Baby Boy

I'm 21 weeks pregnant and I'm just now posting about it on this blog. Cringe.

So.

Baby boy was a surprise and yet a welcome one. I admit that I had to grapple with it at first because of the circumstances at the time (weariness on every level, up to my neck in work, a dreary winter, etc) but I pulled out and God has been faithful. My nausea was significantly less than with the girls. I had a feeling this one was going to be a boy but I always hesitate to voice that out loud to anyone except Greg. Before finding out the gender, I was pretty convinced Ava was a girl and I felt Darcy was a girl but thought it was because I already had one and was influenced by that so I wasn't too confident in that feeling. The feeling was different with this boy. It was pretty clear on the ultrasound at 12 weeks.

The pregnancy hasn't been as smooth as with the girls. We had a pretty scary episode but it turned out to be a harmless hematoma. The OB could only guess that the hematoma was a miscarriage threatening to happen but she reminded us that there is no way to confirm this hypothesis. No one knows what causes hematomas. I'm just so thankful that God's hand is wrapped around this baby, keeping him safe and alive.

So, here we are, a baby boy is growing in my belly. It's a strange concept to me. A boy. I'm used to girls. What am I going to do with a boy?! Greg's pretty happy and excited.

Prior to getting pregnant, I felt anxious about having three kids as opposed to two or four. Three means one may feel left out. I definitely did not see a fourth in my future, I just don't have it in me. So that meant two or three. I could sense that my family wasn't complete yet so two kids didn't feel right and yet I felt bad that my kids would be stuck at being three musketeers. The only solution I could see at having three kids was if the third was a boy. In my mind, the boy may not mind being left out of the girly stuff so he wouldn't feel left out. Darcy would be closer to the third in age and likely won't be left out (she'll have a sister to commiserate with and a playmate in her brother) and Ava is such a firstborn that I don't think she would feel left out. She'd be doing her own thing.

So, maybe my worries about one of my children feeling left out are pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things but I think God saw and listened. When I found out the baby was a boy, I thought back to the dilemma (above paragraph) and how I'd thought over it often, long before I got pregnant. I thought it was terribly interesting that it'd worked out like this. I wondered if I'd prayed for a boy when I was contemplating a third so I scoured my prayer journals. I couldn't find a single entry about it. I either prayed about it and didn't write it down or I never prayed about it and just left it hidden in my heart. Either way, God knew what my heart was mulling over. Did He give us a boy because of that unspoken desire for a healthy, happy dynamic in a set of three kids? Maybe it's silly of me to think that. I just can't shake off the conviction that God listened.

God is infinite in his wisdom, goodness, and love and it's been evident in so many ways with this pregnancy.

Baby boy is due around November 1-3!